Why Corporate Excel Training Sucks For Everyone

Corporate Excel trainings, if they are offered at all, are usually three hour classes in which 20 people gather around a projector and more or less watch an instructor go through various features of Excel. Occasionally, students are asked to join along and type in a formula or two, but on the whole, it’s usually a teaching exercise, not a learning exercise.

At Excel Everest, we’ve heard this numerous times from numerous people, and we built our whole business around the premise that firstly, those who have a strong grounding of Excel inside organizations tend to be more successful, and secondly, that the current method of training employees is antique.

After having gone through a number of Excel trainings ourselves, we don’t think people are *actually* learning from the corporate Excel classes. Along with countless users we’ve talked to, a recent bit of feedback from an Excel Everest customer lays this out pretty clearly:

I have attended numerous one and two day programs “teaching” excel. I found that once the program is over, I am no better than I was before. For me most programs show us all the things Excel can do but they don’t really teach you Excel. Your program is the first that I feel that I am learning it such that I can use it. I also like that I can repeat and review any particular lesson any time. If you don’t do/use it you lose it. – Kimber

Kimber, like many others, has been there… she’s attended classes that have no relevance, no real world scenarios, and no accountability. Plus, our guess is that it’d be difficult to describe any of them as “fun.”

No only is this a losing situation for people like Kimber, but from the perspective of the company who’s paying for trainings, it’s also a risky proposition. There’s no way to know that employees are actually learning from the trainings, given that there’s no accountability. Return on investment simply cannot be shown.

We’ve thought deeply how to fix this problem of ROI as well as the problem of employees, well, not learning Excel, and we built Excel Everest, a complete training course in Excel that’s built entirely into an Excel file. Imagine a huge workbook that teaches employees Excel, challenges them with exercises and grades you automatically in a comprehensive scoreboard. We’ve built Excel Everest to be a self-service and fun learning tool. An employee can complete the tutorial on her own time.

From the employers standpoint, this makes perfect sense as well. If an employee completes Excel Everest, she can simply send the completed document over to her manager, and her manager can quickly see that she has learned the material. It’s as easy as that. The employer knows that the money they spent on Excel Everest is paying off.

// Excel Everest (http://www.ExcelEverest.com) is a complete Excel training course built inside an Excel file. The goal of Excel Everest is to provide an immersive, interactive, learning Experience for employees, all while demonstrating a return on investment to employers. Excel Everest is currently being used in organizations such as Google, Hymans Roberston, and PlayCore.